All posts tagged ‘violence’

Image: Chart created by Jessamyn from FBI data housed at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, bjs.gov.

With each passing day since the Sandy Hook tragedy, we hold our children tight, tuck them into their beds, and grieve for the parents who will never kiss another sleeping cheek. Then we wonder. How safe are our children? Could this happen to our babies? In our communities?

The questions are natural, and the answers seem frightening.

The first lesson that any law enforcement officer, criminologist, or security specialist has to learn is that any sufficiently motivated offender is likely to succeed. That’s hard to live with, and many of us in this field develop a sense of hyper-vigilance because we are alive to the darkest possibilities of human nature. We have to stop searching for answers that don’t exist and give up the myth of a total security solution.

Crisis-oriented safety measures are comforting, but they will never completely succeed. If we ever perfected school campus security — we never will, but let’s imagine — then the next perpetrators would find different methods. They might hijack a school bus, or develop a bomb, or, or, or….

So how do I find comfort? I look at the criminal-justice field as a whole and I am tremendously impressed with how far we have come in the last 40-odd years. Take a look at the homicide rate per 100,000 and tell me: Would you rather be raising a child now when the homicide rate is the lowest it’s been in decades, or in 1980, before Columbine, when Atari ruled, Call of Duty hadn’t even been imagined, Smurfs were Smurfing, and the murder rate was twice as high? Continue Reading “Thoughts After Sandy Hook: We Are the Safest We’ve Been in 40 Years” »

Last week, reps from Al Jazeera English’s The Stream contacted GeekMom, asking if any of our writers would be interested in participating in a segment on violence in video games. I agreed to participate and spent part of an afternoon watching segments of the show in preparation.

The Stream is an interesting concept. The program is filmed in a studio where a host and featured guest (often a college professor) begin discussion on a topic before the conversation is taken out into the broader community. At that point, an in-studio social media editor reads comments from Twitter, peppers the conversation with pertinent video clips, and questions a second group of guests who participate via Google Hangout and are also encouraged to live-chat their responses to the emerging story. The program is available online but then also broadcast on Al Jazeera English TV.

Despite the fact that The Stream won both a Peabody and a Webby (among other awards) for journalism and innovation earlier this year, I admit that I had some lingering concerns about the possibility of an anti-American bias to the show (my own bias), particularly when, in reading promotional material on the site the day prior to my segment, I realized that the primary focus of the ” violent video games” argument would be first-person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops II. While my teenaged sons do play some M-rated games (currently, Halo 4 and Dishonored are in heavy weekend rotation), I wasn’t familiar with the Call of Duty franchise. After watching some YouTube clips of the game online, I wondered, “Is this how foreign countries think American children spend all of their free time?”

And yet, as the host of The Stream pointed out, the truth is, the game sold $500 million in its’ first 24 hours, was a trending topic on Twitter, and is played by children. If you look at the incarceration rates in America, it seems a legitimate question: does the ubiquity of video game violence beget real-life violence? And if it does, I also wondered: is there a difference between the human-on-human violence depicted in Call of Duty and the human-on-aliens violence my son and his friends rabidly look forward to each weekend when they’re allowed to turn on their consoles and play Halo 4?

Douglas Gentile, a psychology professor at Iowa State University claimed that research says:

Aggression is multicausal. There are over 100 known risk factors for aggression; media violence is just one of them — not the biggest but not the smallest. The only way that anyone does something seriously violent is if they have multiple risk factors and limited protective factors for violent behavior, and thankfully most of our children have a great many protective factors, can consume a lot of violent video games, and still never do anything violent.

A second professor, Christopher Ferguson, from Texas A&M International University, put the argument in context for me at the end of the show when he said:

Whenever new media comes out, we tend to go through a same pattern. 50 years ago with comic books, we had psychiatrists going up before Congress and saying that comic books were the cause of not only juvenile delinquency but homosexuality (because apparently Batman and Robin were secretly gay). At the time period when you have older adults who are not using the new media you oftentimes see these types of panics evolve around them and it’s usually after two or three decades [that you see attitudes change].

Ferguson went on to encourage parents to make informed decisions. I’d take that a step further and suggest that parents who aren’t gamers themselves familiarize themselves with the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) website and use the mobile app when shopping for games for their kids. Though I’d love if the website linked to actual video clips of content descriptors like “strong language,” “blood and gore,” “violence,” or “sexual themes” within each game so that I had a concrete idea of exactly what my children would be exposed to, these descriptors can be a good first look at games and are certainly better than nothing at all.

I find that this can be a challenging gulf to traverse. My kids look forward to gaming with their friends and seem to love the challenge and the planning these more mature games require. Last weekend, the cheers, groans, laughter, and teasing from the livingroom while the boys and their friends were playing Halo 4 together sounded exactly like a group of guys watching a football game together. I wonder sometimes as I read the warnings on the back of these video games, “Am I concerned about the content in this game or am I just uncomfortable that my kids are growing up and grappling with more complex questions, even in play?”

Here are three titles recommended to me by others, and they are all VERY graphic in both sex and/or violence. So we’re clear, I didn’t just pick them up, OK? I used to think I was a strange woman that liked her paranormal, adventure stories with a healthy dose of skin, but obviously I’m not alone. I also must have women characters that aren’t morons or slaves. But that, I know, is still strange.

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan is a bit too colorful in both the sex and violence, but hey, the main character is a werewolf — the last werewolf to survive the methodical killing by secret government forces of all supernatural creatures, and a mysterious virus. Jake Marlowe (heh, a werewolf named Jacob…) wishes he cared. He is full of the melodramatic but ripely amusing ennui that only a 200-year-old monster could have. Without giving my teen daughter any context, I would read aloud some quotes like: “To repeat: Total self-disgust is a kind of peace — because further ignominy can add nothing to it. Standing there washing myself in front of her I made an intellectual concession to the debasement, but it was only moments before I was enjoying the soft soap and perfectly adjusted heat of the water. Put the right music behind this, I thought, and I could be advertising shower gel. I dried off with a white towel that might have been manufactured in heaven. The flesh can’t help it. The flesh merely reports. When I’d finished I was tired and roseate and curiously pleased with the ongoing failure of myself.”

Bullying is one of those hot topics right now as it seems to be rampant across the country. It is one of the topics that I care strongly about because I was a victim of bullying myself when I was younger. Eduction.com now has a series of articles with tips to help parents deal with bullying.

I was a short, quiet girl when I was a child. I was also very geeky and didn’t really try to go with the crowd at all. This probably made me the ideal target for bullying. When I was in middle school, I became the target of a girl who was much bigger than I was. She would call me names, push me into windows and would smash me in the head with a brush in shop class. It was one of the worst times in my life.

I remember begging my parents not to go to the principal because I didn’t want it to get worse. The only place I felt safe at school was in band class, because there were too many people in there for her to beat me up. Finally my parents did go to the principal, and the abuse did finally stop. I did become even more segregated and shunned from my classmates, but it was a relief to not be beat up anymore.

Even though my daughter is only three, I’m already worrying about bullying for her. So I was really interested in what Education.com had to say on the subject. They surveyed 500 parents and 500 principles on the subject, and the results were a little scary.

Parents report that the vast majority (75%) have been involved in bullying in some way (as a bully, victim or witness).

Only about a third of parents feel fully prepared to help their child work through a bullying situation whether the child is a victim (33%), a witness (40%), or a bully (42%).

Only 38% of principles report that they have sufficient resources to effectively implement bullying programs, curricula & policies in their schools.

Because of this survey, Education.com has published some tips for parents. There are tips for all parents to help stop bullying, for parents of kids who are bullied and for parents whose kids are the bullies. These tips may be able to help parents help start a dialogue with their children or even figure out why a bully is doing what they are doing. Because there is usually an underlying reason that needs to be figured out before the bullying can be addressed.

Bullying affects so many people, and it can result in death. This makes it so important to have ways to deal with bullying if it comes up for your child. As a victim myself, I truly hope my daughter never has to go through what I did.